1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data protection for embedded devices in integrated circuits. More particularly, the invention deals with security in so-called Network-on-Chips (NoC) circuits.
2. Description of Related Art
In the field of integrated circuits, the level of integration that silicon technology has reached allows the use of advanced design processes for enabling applications that were to date infeasible.
The number of cores per die and the complexity of interactions among them have been increased accordingly. The complexity of new systems spawns the challenge of enabling reliable communication channels between cores. This challenge becomes more and more difficult as the number of integrated cores per design increases.
To increase the level of integration as well as the reliability of communication, the so-called Network-on-Chip (NoC) approach has been proposed to connect and manage a communication between a variety of embedded elements as well as to manage communication between the integrated circuit and outside blocks.
Similar to networked computers, a NoC provides an efficient means to manage communications among any collection of distributed systems, which, for complex systems on a chip (SoCs), incorporating for example several NoCs, can be individual blocks and/or clusters of functionalities that must all communicate with each other.
Although the use of such a complex communication infrastructure provides many advantages, security in such a system is one of the main issues to be considered.
In the state of the art, one approach to provide security in NoCs was based on an exchange of cryptographic keys within the NoCs, addressing in particular the protection from power and/or electromagnetic attacks of a system containing not secure cores as well as secure ones.
According to another approach, it has been proposed to use low and high security virtual channels to transmit information in a secure area, giving higher priority to information flowing in the high security virtual channels.
According to a further approach, a firewall connected to the Network on-Chip has been used to protect the system integrity and the media content transmitted between On-Chip processing blocks and various inputs and outputs as well as between On-Chip processing blocks and memory sub-systems.